Stars Rain Down (16 page)

Jack advanced along one wall and motioned for the others to take the opposite side. Their flashlights danced along shelves as they closed in on the source of the noise, then Jack raised his up with the flare gun at its side and found... nothing.

He muttered, "What the hell's going on here?"

The other two were standing opposite him now, shoulders shrugged and heads on a swivel. What was he missing?

There was another sound. Whispering? "Does anyone else hear that, or did I pick a bad time to start hallucinating?"

"I hear it," Cozar said.

"Me too," added Hartnell while she took a step forward. "Seems to be coming from the floor, chief. Hard to tell with this damned mask on, though."

Jack took a good look at the floor. It was hard to make things out in the circle of his flashlight, so he started scanning around with it. There was a small carpet with a corner raised, and a circular patch of tiles suspiciously free of dust. "You may be on to something, Corpsman."

He re-latched the gun's safety and returned it to its holster, then lifted up the carpet. Beneath, he found a rectangular panel with a shiny metal handle.

"Trap door," he said. "I think we have survivors."

He didn't want to say it for fear of getting his hopes up, but there it was.
Survivors.
He hadn't seen anyone alive since the woman on the first day, and he didn't want to think about that. Not ever again, if he could.

"Hold my flashlight," he said as he shoved it into Cozar's hand. Then he grabbed the handle and gave the door a good tug. It was heavier than he expected, but with a little effort, it opened and revealed a short wooden staircase leading into the darkness.

Something shifted in the shadows, and Jack heard breathing. He held out his hand and Cozar handed him the flashlight. For a second, he considered pulling the flare gun back out, but decided against it. If they were people, he didn't want to panic them. Panicked people were unpredictable.

On the other hand, if this was a trap, he was already screwed.

He took two tentative steps into the cellar, and ducked his head down to have a look around. His flashlight swept the small storage room, and what he saw made his breath catch in his throat. A family of six were huddled on the far side, dressed in torn and dirty clothes.

They looked at him with wide eyes like he was the reaper come to claim them. A mother and father, teenage daughter, two sons and an infant. The baby was coughing, and the mother rocked him, whispering something into his ear over and over again.

Jack didn't know any Chinese beyond the names of entrées, and he even screwed those up half the time. Albright knew a little, but she was elsewhere.

"Hello?" he said.

No response.

He had another option. The Corps had developed a language to allow brigades from different parts of the world to communicate on some basic level. It had a simple syntax and a small vocabulary, making it easy to learn, but severely limited. A corpsman could tell someone his job or where to go, but describing a movie plot would be next to impossible.

The ERC also spread pamphlets around the globe and offered free courses, with the goal of making it easier for corpsmen to communicate with refugees.
"Please be calm"
Jack said.
"I'm here to help"

The children were sobbing, and their father tried to quiet them. No one reacted at all to what he said. Jack lifted his gas mask and tried again.
"I'm here to help. Do you understand me?"

Nothing. He wasn't surprised. For all of their efforts, he'd never met a single person outside the Corps who understood it. He thought it was worth a try, though, and suspected the Corps' leadership had felt more or less the same way.

Jack looked back over his shoulder and shouted hoarsely, "We've got live ones. Hartnell, gather some cloth and water so we can improvise masks. Sunglasses or goggles also if you can find them."

It occurred to Jack that the poor folks couldn't see anything but his flashlight. In their position, he'd be scared shitless too.

He slid the flashlight's casing back and reconfigured it into a lantern, and the small supply room was filled with dim light. "I'm here to help," he said in English, and motioned to the ERC patch on his shoulder.

Everyone around the world knew the symbol: two hands in a diamond, gripping each other at an angle as if one was helping the other up. The family recognized it, and this time, their reaction was immediate. Jack suddenly had two small boys hugging his legs, while the parents began to spew incomprehensible babble at him. The father motioned to the mother, who in turn was propping up her still coughing infant. Jack didn't understand the words, but the message came through clear enough.

He removed his glove and motioned toward the child. The mother nodded, and he reached out and felt its head. He wasn't being particularly scientific, but the baby felt warm to the touch, and its eyes were red. That was enough to tell Jack he was out of his league.

"Cozar, get Albright and bring her back. Tell her we've got an infant with a fever and a cough."

"Roger," Cozar said, and he took off running. That was the right reaction. Jack was always glad to see a corpsman pound dirt when given a task.

The parents were still heatedly telling him something, and the father was making all kinds of motions with his hands, but the gestures didn't help at all. He hoped whatever they were trying to tell him wasn't too important.

He put his hand on the father's shoulder and said, "It's going to be okay," in a reassuring voice. "There's a doctor on the way, and we're going to get you out of here." The father didn't understand a word of it, but saying it made Jack feel better.

He peeled the small boys from his legs, then crouched down and took a good look at each. Their faces were dirty and they were frightened, but they looked healthy. The younger of the two had a quivering lip, and his eyes were wet with tears. He had to be six or seven years old, and he was trying as hard as he could not to cry.

"Don't sweat it, buddy," Jack said. "You're both very brave little kids. After what you've been through, you're allowed to cry, okay." It didn't matter that they couldn't understand him. He tousled the boy's hair and gave him a pat on the shoulder.

The girl was standing in the far corner, shivering and looking at her feet. Jack had done enough rescues to know that was normal, and he also knew better than to bother her. Teenage girls tended to react better to women after trauma, and he decided to leave her be.

A minute later, Albright came down the stairs at full sprint with her medkit in hand, then said something in Chinese and went directly to examining the infant. She raised her mask to get a better look, and Jack could see utter amazement all over her face. It was the expression of a lottery winner. Albright always had a special affinity for children, and this put her on top of the world.

She learned what she needed quickly then took a look at the other children. "Nothing too serious," she said as she worked, "The little guy's just having a bad reaction to the mold and dust. Should be fine once we get him out of here."

Jack breathed a sigh of relief. That was exactly what he needed to hear. He was desperate for a win, and he got one. "Can you tell 'em we're bringing a car?"

"Dream on," she said. "I know how to say I'm a doctor, order the general's chicken, and ask for a toilet, but that's about all the Mandarin I know."

"That's okay. We'll figure something out," he said. "We always do."

Hartnell stopped at the top of the steps with her arms full of cloth, water and cheap sunglasses. "I got what you asked for, chief."

That's when it happened. Jack was filled with a feeling he hadn't had in more than a week. If these people had survived, then so had others. Possibly many others. He had a reason to be there in that wasteland, and more importantly, he had something other than another heap of corpses to look forward to.

He had hope, and it was the single most precious thing in the world.

Back when he first saw aliens piling up the dead, Jack retreated. His body was stuck there in the remains of China, but his mind ran all the way back to the comfort of his girlfriend's arms, where it stayed while his body marched on. He did what was necessary to survive, but only in a dim, mechanical daze. He was an animated corpse that had forgotten to fall.

Then he found a family of survivors, and everything changed. The discovery filled him with a ray of hope that brought him back to life. From that point on, he was fully charged up and firing on all cylinders because it wasn't just about survival anymore; it was about saving lives, and that meant everything to him.

It woke all of them up.

Nikitin and Chase returned with a delivery van which had carried more than its fair share of fish by the smell of things. No one liked the stink, but the vehicle was spacious and all in one piece, so they spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning it up and packing it full of supplies. By the end of the night, the van was stocked with enough food and water for a month, and still had space left over for a makeshift medical bay.

The next day, they added two more cars to their collection. The first was a minivan for the family of survivors, retrofitted with a few good layers of grating over its vents. It had all the amenities, including a plush interior and an audio deck loaded with Chinese pop.

The second vehicle was a beaten up and rusty old jeep that'd seen better days. Nikitin was adamant about having an off-road vehicle for scouting purposes, and the jeep was the best he could find... or so he said. Jack suspected Nikitin just had a soft spot for beaten up and rusty old jeeps.

On the third day, they mounted up and hit the road as the winds began to rise again. Jack and Nikitin rode ahead in the jeep where they both took a serious sandblasting in the open air. It was worse than they'd expected, and at every stop, they layered on more spare clothing until they both looked like mummies. The extra layers made the ride survivable, if not particularly comfortable.

The jeep scouted ahead by a paltry fifty meters most of the time, while the others trundled along behind them with their headlights on. It was slow going at first, but roads proved to be in excellent condition and they picked up speed. They traveled two hundred kilometers in that first week, and Jack suspected they could cover ground faster if they wanted.

The caravan stopped to check for supplies and survivors at every settlement and the search was well worth the effort. They found plenty of both, and their small group sprouted into a motorcade. Survivors started coming out to meet them, drawn out of hiding by the sounds of car engines and human voices shouting over the roar. The motorcade eventually swelled into a mass migration, with a population in the thousands who covered a kilometer of road in puttering cars.

Every influx brought another handful of orange jumpsuits, stocked up and ready for duty. Many spoke multiple languages including English, and they found constant work translating. The local guides were also plentiful, although each one delivered the same morbid warning: Don't bother with the cities. There's nothing there but death.

They traveled for more than two straight months past the ruins of towns whose names Jack would never know, at the foot of the great mountains to the North which they only saw in silhouette. Always headed westward, they passed from China to Myanmar, then along the northern border between India and Nepal, and finally through Pakistan where they met several more groups like their own.

As they neared the end of Pakistan, they finally caught sight of a city. Where Peshawar had been, there was a black and still smoking petrified forest, with a layer of shattered concrete for soil, and the twisted skeletons of buildings standing in for trees. A power capable of such total destruction was unthinkable.

They skirted the edge of the ash heap faster than common sense might have suggested, and as they headed for the mountains, no one bothered to look back.

In single file, they entered the Khyber Pass, which Jack had once heard described as a knife-wound in the mountains. The words hadn't meant much to him at the time, but they were all too appropriate once he saw the steep gash as if the earth had been sliced away.

The pass had been used by armies since the beginning of time, and he wondered how it would be remembered from then on, having carried so many survivors away from that terrible destruction.

When they emerged on the other side of the mountains, the travelers saw the most wonderful thing they'd ever seen. After more than two months in dust-choked twilight, they could finally see the bright blue sky again. They were back on Earth.

There they found a village built of sand-colored stone which rose up out of the landscape like a natural formation. It was part of the land, and Jack wondered if that was what had spared it from the onslaught. The village was whole, intact and full of people, and along the road stood a handful of soldiers in desert camouflage with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. For the first time Jack could remember, he was glad to see soldiers. Overjoyed, in fact.

With the fish van behind him, Jack pulled the jeep over and killed the engine, then he peeled off his gas-mask. He took one giant lung full of clean air. Fresh, reasonably dust free air. He held it as long as he could, and the feeling was amazing. As he took the second deep breath, he heard Nikitin doing the same beside him.

In another moment, he pulled off all his extra layers and tossed them in the back seat until he was down to just the jumpsuit. He felt naked, and he was quickly struck by how bad he smelled.

"I was starting to worry the whole world was choked up with that cloud of shit," Nikitin said. "Would you look at this, though. It didn't even make it over the Hindu Kush."

"Unbelievable," Jack said as he stretched. He felt the overwhelming urge to curl up on the nearest rock and take a long nap. To sun himself like a lizard.

A soldier marched up to the jeep. He was a young man, a couple years younger than Jack, but moved like a seasoned veteran. The markings on his uniform were Mashriq Coalition, a union of Middle-Eastern nations that had helped found the United Earth Organization. The Mashriq Coalition was always fighting separatists somewhere in its territory, and any given soldier had seen his share of action.